Why do ADHD brains love entrepreneurship?
Have you ever thought of turning your hobby into your career? Or found a new hyperfixation that would work amazingly as a business? Do you find yourself coming up with entrepreneurial ideas on a regular basis? Today we’re looking at the combination of entrepreneurship and ADHD.
Firstly, this blog today is based on a YouTube video I put out. If you would prefer to watch instead of read, you can find the video here:
This post was inspired by one I did a few weeks ago where I spoke about how the world of work can often be a struggle for those of us with ADHD because it is usually not set up in a way that is ADHD friendly and this can make working, something we have to do to survive, really difficult for us.
In fact one of the papers I looked at in that video noted that several of the participants they interviewed in the study had become or expressed interest in becoming self-employed in order to manage their work conditions according to their specific needs, working with their brain as I like to call it.
Since becoming an entrepreneur myself after years in corporate life, I’ve suddenly found that I am surrounded by people with ADHD even when I’m not looking to find them. Even communities that are not billed as being ADHD friendly specifically seem to attract us and I’ve found myself working with people who, even if not diagnosed, have brains that work in a very similar way to mine.
It also makes me think of last week’s post around how ADHD could be evolutionarily maladaptive to sitting quietly in a classroom and self-regulating for the whole school day if that’s the case, it seems pretty intuitive that we would find the same problems with, for example, self-regulating in an office for a full working day.
So today we’re going to be looking at whether this is just anecdotal (it’s not) and some of the reasons why we find entrepreneurship so attractive, using a variety of papers I have found on the topic to give us the answers we are looking for. So let’s get going.
The first paper I want to look at today is one called “ADHD-like behaviour and entrepreneurial intentions”, published in 2015. This paper took what, by ADHD research terms is a huge sample, of 10,104 students and found that students with a higher level of ADHD-like behaviour are more likely to have entrepreneurial intentions, ie more likely to want to become an entrepreneur in the future.
In mind this picture is the person on stage going: “Who wants to be an entrepreneur?!” and all the ADHD students going: “me! me! me!” (I have the most fun writing these captions)
I think I’ve mentioned this on one of my earlier posts but in my third year of uni I took a business studies module which contained a short series on entrepreneurship and I found myself really interested in the idea of becoming an entrepreneur, told one of my friends at the time and he told me: “I think you have to be a certain kind of person to become an entrepreneur” with the “and you’re not it” left unsaid but very loud regardless and this put me off pursuing entrepreneurship for nearly a decade. Who’s not the right kind of person to be an entrepreneur now, eh?
The paper refers to past research on entrepreneurs that suggests that they are usually individuals who have high energy levels, dare to pursue risky activities and who show resilience in times of adversity, and links these to the hyperactivity and impulsivity of ADHD. Re-reading this again I’m wondering if our weird calmness in times of a crisis is also present there in the point on “resilience in times of adversity”.
This point on resilience in times of adversity is interesting. The paper suggests that
“By experiencing the negative consequences of ADHD from early childhood, those individuals may develop a higher resistance to failure as well as way to cope with adversity and achieve success against significant odds”
and it’s not the only paper we’ll look at today that mentions this.
I find it interesting because it goes against other reading I’ve done which suggests that people who have ADHD tend to have low resilience and I’m not sure at this point whether this is due to stigma around ADHD, or whether some people are just impaired in a way that hits their resilience a lot harder than others, but it is refreshing to be acknowledged that we do constantly come across challenges and setbacks far more than the neurotypical population and that we are constantly finding ways forward from them and that can be considered resilience in its own right.
The paper talks about the context of person-environment fit and how if we’re in the wrong role then our person-environment fit is likely to be poor and therefore make us more likely to pursue entrepreneurship where we are more in control of our environment and can shape it to give us a better fit.
I would say these watermelons are not in the right environment fit. Please email me and let me know if you disagree.
I find this person-environment fit idea to be really interesting in the case of ADHD because we do spend so much of our time in an environment that isn’t built for us and like the point around resilience, it’s acknowledging that it’s not our fault that we’re finding things hard, it’s that we’re trying to fit the environment, instead of the environment fitting us.
Entrepreneurship in contrast can be thought of as being a better fit for us due to our resilience, impulsiveness and risk tolerance, and so the paper posits that this might be why we opt into entrepreneurship at a higher rate than the general population.
However, one thing I do have to note about this study is that it looks at ADHD-like behaviour, not an ADHD diagnosis specifically and given entrepreneur-like behaviour can look ADHD-like, it’s not completely clear that actual ADHD would have the same relationship with entrepreneurship.
But that’s where my second paper comes in. “Entrepreneurship and attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder: a large-scale study involving the clinical condition of ADHD” actually looked at this in people who are clinically diagnosed with ADHD and examined whether people with ADHD are actually more likely to pursue entrepreneurship and fortunately for the topic of this video, after studying 9800 university students found that ADHD does predict entrepreneurial action. In fact, it found that people with ADHD were almost twice as likely to become entrepreneurs than the general population.
I’m not going to dive too much into this paper as it hits a lot of the same points as the first, but I wanted to highlight a line that stood out to me. It said:
“Given the myriad of unproductive and destructive behaviours linked to ADHD, entrepreneurial action may be a constructive outlet regardless of whether a venture is ultimately founded and successful”
I’ve pondered on this a little. They don’t give any further indication about what a “constructive outlet” might mean but I guess what they’re trying to say is that regardless of whether we’re successful in our entrepreneurial adventures or not, the fact we try has a positive impact on our wellbeing in some way, whether that’s the things we learn or the connections we make along the way. And given how much us ADHDers feel like we’re failing, I think it’s nice to know that even if we do fail at our entrepreneurial activities, that doesn’t stop it being a net benefit to our lives in some way overall.
Moving away from studies with large sample sizes, the next paper I want to look at is on a much more intimate level and is based upon interviews with 14 entrepreneurs who are diagnosed with ADHD. I quite like reading papers that interview us to take into account our lived experience rather than making observations on us and there are some interesting insights in here that the previous papers didn’t pick up on.
The paper is called “Entrepreneurship and Psychological Disorders: How ADHD can be productively harnessed” and incidentally makes a statement that the fact that ADHD is highly genetic and has remained in the gene pool throughout evolution means that it is a natural variation, which relates back to last week’s episode on ADHD and evolution.
Through the 10 hours of interviews taken, the authors of this paper were able to get a bit more into the personal whys of why their ADHD participants pursued entrepreneurship and a lot of them point back towards that person-environment fit.
They found that all of their participants mentioned that one of the greatest benefits of being an entrepreneur is that they could adapt work to meet their energy level, working when their energy was highest and taking time out when it wasn’t there without needing to adhere to certain times of the day. This is actually something I’m still learning to do as part of my journey to working with my brain better instead of against it.
In a similar vein of why they made the jump, several participants actually mentioned starting the business on impulse because they were bored in their prior jobs and found something else that they were passionate about. This ties in with previous points around impulsivity, and impatience, with many entrepreneurs engaging in several new activities simultaneously. Not me starting two new businesses at about the same time…
I knew if I searched the word “jump” I’d find a stock image like this of someone “jumping into the unknown”.
They did mention downsides of this however, namely that the ability to work to their energy levels often led to overworking and troubles sleeping. Given these entrepreneurs were starting businesses they were passionate about, they spent extensive time working on these areas and honing their skills, meaning there was often not a lot of time for things other than work and sleep.
What’s interesting is that this was viewed in a positive light, with multiple participants suggesting that having a higher work capacity than others is one of the greatest pros of having ADHD. Again this is something that makes me pause in context with other research on this topic.
We’re often considered to be lazy and the previous research I read on personality types scored us as lower on conscientiousness, implying that we are not particularly hard working. Yet we have entrepreneurs stating that one of the largest advantages of having ADHD is their ability to work so much harder than the general population.
This duality of ADHD being seen as wholly negative in some contexts and an asset in others is interesting and is part of the reason why I do the work that I do, because I believe that with the right support we can harness ADHD in a positive way and I love helping people to do just that in their careers and businesses. While I’m ADHD neutral, I end up consuming so much negativity about ADHD that reading studies like this one where ADHD is acknowledged as having advantages too is really inspirational for me.
And actually this paper ends up in this space, relating it again back to the topic from last week, and asks “Could ADHD be a human variation pre-adpted for thriving in a qualitatively different context such as entrepreneurship?”.
If you haven’t seen last week’s post on us potentially being adapted to foraging then go take a look because it’s pretty interesting!
Now this post has focused on why we are interested in entrepreneurship the reasons why it suits us, but we haven’t asked one very important question. Yes we might prefer going into entrepreneurship compared to traditional careers, but are we actually successful at it?
The answer is more of an “it depends” and there appears to be a branch of research focused on answering this question so we’re going to dive even deeper into this topic next week to find the circumstances under which ADHDers are successful and the ones under which they struggle, and look into some of the reasons why.
References:
ADHD-like behaviour and entrepreneurial intentions (Verheul et al., 2015)
If this resonates with you and feel you would be interested in talking to an adhd and autism-friendly coach, feel free to get in touch. If you’re looking for more blog posts, you can find them here.
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